


The General Push and Pull of Things

by apollos



Category: South Park
Genre: Exploration of Gender, F/M, Genderfluid Character, M/M, Pretention, Pronouns, Romance, Sexuality, Vignettes, ignorance, this is so hard to tag please leave suggestions in the comments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:06:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4926163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wendy and Kenny are genderfluid and in love. An exploration of gender and romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The General Push and Pull of Things

**Author's Note:**

> okay first thing's first i'm cis, so. if anything is inaccurate or even offensive, let me know. my goal for this was to explore gender in a romantic relationship; this is primarily a romantic story with gender as a subplot. anyway, i hope you enjoy this, and feel free to comment if anything seems off.

**Wendy.**

Standing and shaking over her sink when she was thirteen, Wendy cut her hair. Not a little bit, either, but  _all_  of it, cutting it as close to her head as she could without a razor. Black stands fell into the sink, sliding down the drain like snakes, slick and dark from the running water she'd turned on in case she started crying. But she didn't cry and though she shook the lines in her hair was as straight as they could be given the circumstances. Afterwards she left the water running and sat on the rim of the tub, staring at the scissors in her hand and feeling the weight lifted from her. She could feel the air conditioning running along the back of her neck, playing with the small strands of hair like angel's fingers, sending goosebumps running down her spine.

This is what it feels like to be a boy, she thought.

Feels good.

* * *

 

Wendy is not the type of person to sit by idly. That is the antithesis of Wendy. So, on a day where he wakes up instead of she, where he irons a dress shirt before school and eats a peach for breakfast while doing so, he comes up with an idea. Sitting on the couch and waiting for the time to leave for school to arrive, Wendy scrolls through his phone, looking up local LGBT alliances and things of that nature.

He comes up short, of course, but there is a desire itching under his skin.

Sometimes he thinks he can see into people's souls. Not literally, but metaphorically, a sixth sense flowing through him, transforming him into an empath. He can recognize things. Sexualities; genders; a person's deepest fears. He's better at it when he's like this, chest bound under his clothes and ears and eyes perked.

It doesn't take an empath to see what swirls inside of Kenny. It does take an empath to want to understand. Kenny's always been there, just like everybody else has always been there, and yet Kenny stands apart from the rest. It is not in what Kenny wears, or Kenny's hair, or Kenny's spotted attendance record. It's deeper than that; it's in Kenny's blood, little magnets flowing through Kenny's veins that are the opposite charge of Wendy's, that pull Wendy towards Kenny and attaches them so it would take a force greater than themselves to separate them.

* * *

 

"At the risk of sounding terribly clichéd, I always knew something was different about me." Kenny scuffs a cigarette into their shoe; Wendy stares at them, and their chipped black nail polish and the shaved half of their head, and wants to roll her eyes at how utterly annoying their strict adherence to clichés can be. Wants to pretend it's not endearing at the same time. "I thought it was the death thing, you know. But shit's like an avalanche, sometimes. It all comes on. So I couldn't just not die, I had to be poor, I had to feel like a chick sometimes and sometimes like nothing at all."

Wendy touches their hand. Her nails are cut short and cleaned thoroughly, and if she looks at their conjoined hands, she can trick herself into thinking they're different people then what they are. Half of what Kenny had said swims in her mind, vague and confused—something about death? But there's a lingering recognition of something profound. "I don't think you're that special," is the words she chooses to say, offering her best wolfish grin (she's been practicing.)

"I think you are." Kenny leans forward and kisses her nose. Cigarette perfume and cologne waft towards her in equal amounts. Kenny is much harder to pin down than Wendy is, always, and Wendy wants to crawl inside their skin and learn all of their secrets. To carve open the library in their chest. To read every book.

* * *

 

Wendy goes to prom in a suit. Kenny goes in a dress. Stan and Kyle are voted Prom Queen and King as a joke. Wendy consoles a crying Kyle in the bathroom while Kenny waltzes with Stan on the dance floor.

"I don't understand why  _I_  have to be the queen," Kyle says. Wendy pulls a paper towel out of the dispenser, wets it and wipes at Kyle's face.

_Tell me about it_ , he wants to say, but instead he says, "People can be cruel."

"But they don't care about you and Kenny." That stings. Wendy continues to wipe at Kyle's face, gentle as ever, though he wants to dig the paper towel into his skin.

"They think we're weird," Wendy says. "They avoid us." He knows Kyle thinks they're weird, too, deep inside, but Wendy continues to wipe at his face. "They talk about us behind our backs. We were probably the back-up prank."

Something in Kyle's eyes flash. Wendy knows what it means:  _I wish it were you and not me_. Whatever, Kyle.

"Your face is all dry." Wendy removes the paper towel and crumples it in his hands. "Can't even tell you've been crying. Go on—go find your king."  _And I will find my queen_. Kenny is wearing a proper ball gown, fluffy and pink, a sagging flower pinned to Wendy's lapel matching in color. They're probably going to leave soon; Wendy is thinking about diving into a sea of pink tulle and sleeping forever.

* * *

 

_Some things are hard. Some things are easy. Some things are both and some things are neither. In general, generalizations cannot be drawn. Except for one, perhaps: every individual experience is different._

"That's pretentious as fuck," Kenny says, looking over Wendy's shoulder at his senior thesis.

"Go away!" Wendy slaps Kenny. "I'm almost done."

"I'm just kidding." Kenny's arms are wrapping around Wendy's waist. There goes any hope of finishing this tonight; Wendy swirls around in the swivel chair and looks up at Kenny's eyes. They're the same shade of brown as the freckles strewn across the bridge of Kenny's nose. Wendy's heart seizes up like a medical emergency. Inspiration strikes.

"Wait." He wrings himself from Kenny's grip, already feeling so lonely and cold, and hurries through the last sentence:

_It's true: it's the little things. Common threads can be found but the details will always be different. The recognition of this truth, as it has been proven to be in this paper, is the key to understanding the general push and pull of things._

 

**Kenny.**

Endless strings of questions like rosary beads slipping and sliding between their fingers. Their strongest memory of church as a child was the smell, the elderly smell of moth balls and the pissy smell of fear and a lack of understanding.  _Mommy, why do I have to die?_   _Everybody dies, Kenny. Not like me, Mommy. Not like me_. The conversation escapes, a starving, frightened creature hiding in a cave. The light cannot touch it; it will burn.

Too many things to figure to figure out too fast. Repeated death is heavy on a three-year-old's, a seven-year-old's, a thirteen-year-old's, shoulders. No time to question why they play dress-up like a girl, why they grow their hair long until it shags around their ears, why it feels wrong every time somebody calls them  _boy_. They have to save the world. And again. And a third time. Sometimes it feels like once a week they are battling Heaven and Hell both, dying and rebirthing, a perfect soldier. Frivolous bullshit gets lost in the mix.

It's their friend from down under, the prince of brimstone and fire, that helps them finally figure it out. They're sitting on chairs of bones on the rocky shore of a lake of fire. Atmospheric and aesthetic to some, boring and usual to them. They'd trade this macabre bravado for a house in the suburbs in a dead man's heartbeat.

Damien blows smoke towards Kenny. Cigarettes don't cause cancer in Hell. "Labels are bullshit," Damien says, amateur philosopher he is. "Gay, straight, bi. All bullshit. Boy, girl. Bullshit. We're all souls."

"I'm inclined to disagree," Kenny says, because they are, because Damien's a pretentious prick, but it niggles into their brain.  _Boy, girl, bullshit_. Kenny most closely identifies with the third.

* * *

 

Wendy has always been a thought in the back of their mind. Since they were kids and ~~she~~ he declared herself himself a boy. There was something genuine about the gesture, about Wendy in general, that draws Kenny towards ~~her~~ him. They watch ~~her~~ him out of the corner of their eyes, in rearview mirrors, across the lunchroom. They haven't moved in the same circles since elementary school, when social barriers were fuzzy and Stan still thought himself straight, so Kenny is both surprised and not surprised at all when Wendy corners them one day at school.

"You're like me," Wendy blurts. Wendy is a boy today, Kenny notices the pressed shirt and his flat chest, the way a blush crawls across his cheeks when hi voice comes out high-pitched. Pronouns corrected. "Aren't you?"

Kenny raises their eyebrows, watches Wendy's eyebrows droop in an exasperated,  _you've got to be kidding me_  kind of manner. "In what way, Wends?"

"In  _this_  way." Wendy gestures to himself. Kenny smiles.

"I know what you meant, I was just yanking your chain. I'm like you. Come on, let's talk."

* * *

 

"It was a struggle," Wendy says. It's lunchtime, a soggy spring day, they're milling around in the courtyard while Kenny chain-smokes and Wendy does homework that's just been assigned. "I felt—I  _still_  feel so aligned to the feminine. I am, you know, a feminist."

"Me too." Kenny shrugs, plucks a cigarette they tucked behind their ear on the shaved half of their head. They watch Wendy watch them. "Doesn't mean shit. And you're still a girl, you know. Sometimes."

"That's why I backed down when I was young, because being a boy all the time felt  _wrong_. Whenever I'm feeling masculine, I feel like a  _traitor_." Wendy furrows her brow. Her homework is forgotten. Her hair is a little on the longish side now, needs a trim, and she's clipped it back with a skeleton hand. Kenny leans over and runs their fingers down the plastic bone. "Maybe my boy name should be Benedict."

"Shh," Kenny says. A smoky kiss to Wendy's mouth. "All in good time, my dear."

* * *

 

Kenny goes to prom in a dress. Wendy goes in a suit. Stan and Kyle are voted Prom Queen and King as a joke. Kenny waltzes with Stan on the dance floor while Wendy consoles a crying Kyle in the bathroom.

Stan is an awkward dancer, all left feet and hesitant to touch Kenny. Kenny wonders if it's the dress, or the lip gloss that barely catches a shimmer in this dull lighting, or just the evident worry for Kyle that's written all over Stan's face. They keep switching roles until Kenny takes a firm lead, moving Stan to move with them.

"It's all bullshit," Kenny says. "All of it. Don't stress about it, Stan, they're just small-town mountain hicks, they can't accept gay."

"But they accept you and Wendy just fine," Stan says, a pout on his lips. Kenny sighs. They knew this was coming.

"They look at us and they see straight, Stan. They don't see the days where we're both boys or both girls or both whatever because they're only looking at what we were assigned at birth. It's a different form of ignorance. But it's still ignorance." Kenny notices that Stan seems to be a better dancer when he's a follower and refrains from making a comment on it; he was voted King, Kyle Queen, and Kenny spits out, "It's ignorant, heteronormative  _bullshit_."

It's Stan's turn to sigh. "I just wanted to go to prom with the person I love and be normal."

"Tell me about it." Kenny ignores the look of poison in Stan's eyes—so they don't understand each other's struggles, whatever, Kenny's used to being something people can't understand—and thinks to Wendy in the bathroom. They're leaving soon. Kenny is thinking about wrapping their hands in Wendy's suspenders and pulling him close forever.

* * *

 

_"The real world" does not actually exist. Reality is, as shown throughout this paper, what you make it to be. The real world is every second; there is no moment where you cross over and enter it. To perpetuate this myth creates a humanity that is constantly striving towards something they cannot reach. There is arguable merit in this—_

"Goddammit, Wendy!" Kenny is soaring backwards in their desk chair, being rolled around to face Wendy, who is smiling something wicked and crawling into Kenny's lap. "I was almost done, man. Almost done."

"Shouldn't have waited until the night before it was due," Wendy is murmuring. "It's your  _senior thesis_ , Kenny. It's serious."

"It's bullshit," Kenny says, and they're laughing, because it's an inside joke and it's also the title of Kenny's thesis:  _It's Bullshit_. Kenny knows Wendy thinks it's pretentious. "Also, this is payback, isn't it? For when I distracted you?"

"I still finished mine."

"Hold on."

Kenny swivels back around with Wendy still laughing in their lap, deletes the sentence they've started and writes:

_Constantly planning for the future and wasting time defining the undefinable will prevent the person from realizing the full potential of the now. In the wise words of Toni Morrison, it is always Now, and as shown throughout this paper, Now is the only thing that isn't bullshit in the general push and pull of things._


End file.
